TABLE OF CONTENTS On typical grass- roots, chemical processing facilities, as much as 10% of the total capital investment is allocated to process control equipment, design, implementation, and commissioning. Process control is a very broad topic with many distinct aspects. The following possible sub- topics give some idea of the full breadth of this topic:
In the field, the topic of process control includes the selection and installation of sensors, transmitters, transducers, actuators, valve positioners, valves, variable- speed drives, switches and relays, as well as their air supply, wiring, power, grounding, calibration, signal conditioning, bus architecture, communications protocol, area classification, intrinsic safety, wired interlocks, maintenance, troubleshooting, and asset management.
In the control room, process control encompasses the selection and installation of panel- mounted alarms, switches, recorders, and controllers, as well as Program Logic Controllers ( PLC) and Distributed Control Systems ( DCS). These include analog and digital input/ output hardware, software to implement control strategies, interlocks, sequencing and batch recipes, as well as display interfaces, alarm management, and Ethernet communication to networked computers, which are used to provide supervisory control, inferential measures, data historians, performance monitoring, and process optimization.
Also, the design practice includes
